


Charcoal Sketches

by spiritinthespacebar



Category: Portrait de la jeune fille en feu | Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
Genre: Crushes, Drawing as Power, F/F, Memories, Pre-Canon, Queer Self-Discovery, kissing on a dare
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-21
Updated: 2020-12-21
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:21:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28218372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spiritinthespacebar/pseuds/spiritinthespacebar
Summary: A series of gesture drawings of Héloïse and Marianne in scenes from the past.
Relationships: Héloïse/Marianne (Portrait of a Lady on Fire), Marianne/OFC (Portrait of a Lady on Fire)
Comments: 7
Kudos: 31
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Charcoal Sketches

**Author's Note:**

  * For [idanit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/idanit/gifts).



> I hope you enjoy your Yuletide gift! This story uses a bunch of Writing Techniques(tm) with the intent to make it feel ~conceptually artistic~
> 
> May we all keep looking and drawing and wanting.

The convent offered Héloïse unexpected strictures and unexpected freedoms. At once there was too much solitude and too much attention. She missed her sister, and she saw echoes of her in her new Sisters: the shape of her smile here, the bend of her arm there. It did not remotely replace the real thing.

In the mornings, the sun would flood into their dormitory. Héloïse got used to sleeping on her side, facing away from the window so that the light wouldn’t attack her eyes while she got to the heavy, slow work of opening them. From this position, her first view in the morning was the sunlit hand of Veronique--the girl whose bed was adjacent to hers--which was flung out of the bed each night to dangle just above the dormitory floor. It was a shapely hand, and the dazzling mornings brought out the best in it. Héloïse didn’t keep looking at it once her eyes were fully open; still it stole into her experience of the days.

\--

Marianne kissed a woman before she knew whether or not she would like it. It was the night after she had sold a painting for the first time, and her friends had put together a raucous celebration. From each person’s paltry cupboards, some food or drink had been produced. As the celebrated one, Marianne was enjoined to try everything there was to eat. Then, to try everything there was to drink. It was after midnight when Jacques declared that Marianne’s tasting menu was still ongoing--this time she would kiss everyone present. Some of the crowd had already gone home, but a good two dozen revelers were still scattered about the room. Two dozen mouths sounded more like a challenge than a reward. It was only Marianne’s first sale, though, so who was she to know how it should be celebrated?

There weren’t many women in the carefree artistic set Marianne ran with. The majority of those had gone home by now, too. Marianne hadn’t thought of the two who remained until she had gotten a quarter of the way down the line, and after a series of progressively whiskerier meetings, Lotte leaned forward, pink lips pursed like the men before her.

Marianne looked at Jacques, who was parading her down the line, intending himself to be the last recipient.

“I said everyone,” said Jacques.

Marianne leaned in gamely. Lotte was a heavy and not very responsive kisser. Exactly like her boyfriend, who was next in line, Marianne discovered almost immediately. She’d thought that kissing a woman would be less like kissing a man.

Then, an exhausting nine faces later, came Suzette. She could not have been more different from Lotte and Lotte’s boyfriend--among the best kissers in the room, even as out of patience with the pageantry as Marianne was. Had her face changed after the kiss? If it had, the others in the room gave no sign.

The question of whether she liked to kiss women as well as men, never asked, had its answer.

\--

The sound of the organ always lit a flame of curiosity in Héloïse’s chest, despite its familiarity. She wanted to know the mechanisms of it, how the music could breathe out through the pipes and surround everyone in the room. She wanted to know what it felt like to play the instrument, and how the music was constructed, and what the person who had written it was thinking. She did not feel like she could ask anyone about these things. She could not imagine asking to sit at the organist’s bench, much less such a request being granted.

Just as she wanted to look at the inner workings of the organ, she felt a parallel draw to look at Veronique, who sat straight up in the pew beside her today. Héloïse imagined that Veronique listened to every sound in the chapel with beatific rapture and holiness on her face--not that Héloïse had ever dared to look. Veronique’s clasped hands were not so far from Héloïse’s. She thought about reaching out to touch them. She wished she felt holy herself. What could she do with this feeling of wanting things?

When the service ended, the two of them were swept out of the chapel, the other girls crowding around them.

“Did you like the music today?” Veronique asked Héloïse quietly as they passed through the door.

Héloïse kept her hands away from Veronique’s hands, and her eyes away from Veronique’s eyes. Looking at the floor as it passed underfoot, she nodded a response.

\--

The third time Josefina slept in Marianne’s bed was different from the first two--rather than fall asleep after each had indulged in her desire for the other, they conversed idly for hours. The night had grown long when Josefina asked, “What is your earliest memory?”

After discussions that had been far from personal, Marianne’s skin prickled at the question. It was too familiar. It was an invasion. Perhaps Josefina was drawing her into an arrangement she couldn’t get out of.

Marianne told Josefina about walking with her parents through the city, and her mother’s strong hands lifting her over puddles in the street. The feeling, almost flying, of being small and supported. It was a real memory, and it made for pretty words, and Josefina liked it. She stretched out against Marianne’s side while she talked about her own first memory. Marianne thought this had likely been what she wanted to talk about in any case.

Marianne’s memory was real, but it was not her earliest. Though it had floated through her mind immediately when the question was asked, it was a story she didn’t tell. She didn’t talk about the heft of a little shard of charcoal in her hand. She didn’t describe the sound of paper slipping around under her childish clumsiness. She didn’t say that the drawing had been of herself, or that no one in her household could identify the so-obvious subject. She remembered the power she had felt then. It had been the first time. And she was silent.

\--

Later, arranged among the folds of her green dress, Héloïse would sit motionless. This time, she would fix her eyes on the thing she wanted, and she would not look away.


End file.
